Remote patient monitoring technology plays a huge role in hospital-at-home programs, but challenges remain as tools that record and transmit patient data to providers still need to overcome issues such as data interoperability, according to a Feb. 6 article published in Nature.
Researchers looked at the utility of technology in enabling surgical hospital-at-home programs and highlighted remote patient monitoring technology's current limitations:
- Data: Quality and accuracy of data acquired from wearables and ambient monitoring devices must be put front and center, according to the researchers.
- Alerts: Since surgical hospital-at-home programs have lack of proximity to patients, separating true alerts from false alarms is crucial.
- Vitals: Determining what vitals technology needs to be monitored as well as the appropriate frequency, is also crucial.
- Data interoperability: As hospital-at-home programs continue to integrate more technologies into their programs, often produced by different manufacturers, ensuring data interoperability between devices and data access for remote teams will be essential to a program's success.